In reconstructing that Requiem, they merge their own musical influences with genres including jazz, opera and popular African music. The result should generate a new experience of the original western music piece.

Appointed musical director, composer Fabrizio Cassol continues to write a personal artistic history in which he brings together different musical cultures around a theme. Again and again, he looks for ways to write new stories with existing work, with oral and written traditions. For the Requiem, he brings together musicians whom he previously worked with (in Macbeth and Coup Fatal, among others) with artists for whom this is their first collaboration.

On a theatrical level, director Alain Platel and the group later look for a visual and physical translation of the images and associations that a Requiem conjures up: from the requiem mass to the mass grave into which Mozart was himself dumped.

Cassol and Platel find each other in the way métissages, the blending of cultures, manage to create a new universe. They previously collaborated on Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin - vsprs, 2006), Bach’s St Matthew Passion (pitié!, 2008) and the western baroque repertoire (Coup Fatal, 2014).